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Breaking Language Barriers: A Question Answering Dataset for Hindi and Marathi (arxiv.org)
1 point by PaulHoule on Sep 11, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: An English reading-comprehension set was translated into Hindi and Marathi, with similarity checks keeping question-answer pairs correct. Each new set holds 28,000 samples, the largest for these languages, and the best models trained on them are released.

Abstract

The recent advances in deep-learning have led to the development of highly sophisticated systems with an unquenchable appetite for data. On the other hand, building good deep-learning models for low-resource languages remains a challenging task. This paper focuses on developing a Question Answering dataset for two such languages- Hindi and Marathi. Despite Hindi being the 3rd most spoken language worldwide, with 345 million speakers, and Marathi being the 11th most spoken language globally, with 83.2 million speakers, both languages face limited resources for building efficient Question Answering systems. To tackle the challenge of data scarcity, we have developed a novel approach for translating the SQuAD 2.0 dataset into Hindi and Marathi. We release the largest Question-Answering dataset available for these languages, with each dataset containing 28,000 samples. We evaluate the dataset on various architectures and release the best-performing models for both Hindi and Marathi, which will facilitate further research in these languages. Leveraging similarity tools, our method holds the potential to create datasets in diverse languages, thereby enhancing the understanding of natural language across varied linguistic contexts. Our fine-tuned models, code, and dataset will be made publicly available.

Maithili Sabane, Onkar Litake, Aman Chadha
arXiv:2308.09862 · cs.CL · submitted Aug 19, 2023 · updated Feb 17, 2024
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